The term "software engineering" was first used as the title of a convention held in Garmisch, Germany, in 1968 that was convened to address an emerging "software crisis." NATO called the conference because of its concern with the state of the software industry, which had begun to have great difficulty providing the large, complex software systems that governments and businesses required, on time and within budget. Some advocated an "engineering" approach to the software crisis, bringing the discipline of time-proven engineering methods to the relatively new field of software in order to put the new field on a more secure footing.

In the early 1970s software engineering came to be recognized as a field of study and practice that was distinct from hardware engineering. However, early software development models were based on hardware development models. In 1976 Barry Boehm published a paper...